Mark Meeks, 51, took his own life soon after Grunkemeyer saw him shoveling, Whitehall police Detective Steve Brown said. Meeks' wife, Jennifer Dallas-Meeks, 40; and their children, Abbigail, 8, and Jimmy, 5, were already deadof gunshots to head in what police suspect as a murder-suicide, Brown said.

Forty minutes after neighbors say they saw Meeks clearing snow, he sent a three-paragraph e-mail to his father-in-law, Jim Dallas, 73, of Westerville.

"In the e-mail he didn't come out and say what he was going to do," Brown said. "But the information would lead the reader to believe that something was going to happen in the home or had happened."

Dallas didn't open the e-mail until shortly before 2 p.m. at which point he called the police and asked them to check on the well-being of the family, Brown said.

Officers found Meeks and Dallas-Meeks dead on the floor of the master bedroom at their ranch-style home at 918 Beechwood Rd.. The children, who were home from Etna Road Elementary for a snow day, were found dead in their beds.

"We would like to believe that the children were asleep," Brown said. "But we'll really never know."

Police found three handguns in the home and a page-long suicide note that explained the reason for the killings, although police are not releasing details of the note out of respect for the family, Brown said.

The note, however, did not say anything that would imply the suicide was job-loss related as some media have reported. Meeks had been rehired three weeks earlier at the Honda dealership he worked at as a service adviser after briefly being laid off for economic reasons, said Gary Kennedy, the service director at Immke Northwest Honda in Dublin.

One of the guns appears to have been used to kill Dallas-Meeks and the children, Brown said, and Meeks used a second one on himself.

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